Too focused? You might miss something important

A new study co-authored by Christopher F. Chabris, an assistant professor of psychology, tested the claims of a Boston police officer who said he ran past a brutal police beating without seeing it. After re-creating some conditions of the original incident and testing the perceptions of Union students who ran past a staged fight, the researchers found the officer’s story plausible.

The study appears in the peer-reviewed open access journal i-Perception. Chabris and co-author Daniel Simons, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, study visual cognition, which explores the brain mechanisms that govern visual attention. They are fascinated by how what we see (or don’t see) influences our perceptions of ourselves and of the world.